Love Poems

"Anne Sexton's Love Poems gave American literature its first fully sexual heroine.

The speaker of Sexton's poems dwells with husband and children in affluent, white Protestant America just after the death of JFK....More than a century earlier, Hawthorne had created in The Scarlet Letter a sexual female protagonist, Hester Prynne -- to exhibit her leading a life of disgrace at the margins of the town because of her sin of adultery. In Sexton's New England the margins of town have been transfo...